Last mission to repair the Hubble telescopeHubble space telescope discoveries have enriched our understanding of the cosmos. In this special report, you will see facts about the Hubble space telescope, discoveries it has made and what the last mission's goals are.

For their own goodFifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.

Politics

Biden stretches COPS success

He added police, but he can't take credit for less violence.

WASHINGTON - Rudy Giuliani isn't the only presidential candidate taking credit for making New York City safer. A senator from Delaware is, too.

And like Giuliani, Sen. Joe Biden, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, often overstates his role in the falling crime rates of the 1990s.

During debates, in interviews and in his campaign literature, Biden contends he was crucial to the crime decline because he sponsored legislation in 1994 creating the Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, program that was designed to put 100,000 more sworn officers on the streets through 2001.

Biden uses his leadership on COPS, in which federal money paid for local police officers, as part of his pitch that he has the experience and vision for the White House.

Giuliani, meanwhile, has made New York's impressive crime decline during his tenure as mayor a central theme of his campaign for the Republican nomination.

"Here's a man who brags about how he made the city safe," Biden said of Giuliani during the Democratic debate last week in Philadelphia. "It was the Biden crime bill that became the Clinton crime bill that allowed him to do that."

On his campaign Web site, Biden makes an even bolder claim: "In the 1990s, the Biden Crime Bill added 100,000 cops to America's streets. As a result, murder and violent crime rates went down eight years in a row."

Crime did drop for eight consecutive years: From 1993 to 2001, violent crime fell 32 percent. But tying the decline to COPS is a leap Biden just can't back up.

"That's a hopelessly simplistic statement," said John Worrall, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Dallas and lead author of a recent study in the journal Criminology that examined the effectiveness of COPS.

His research, published this year, came to the same conclusion as several independent and government studies over the years: The COPS program probably had little effect, if any, on falling crime in the 1990s.

More officers certainly don't hurt, experts say. But criminologists have been unable to prove a significant correlation between a few more cops and less crime.

Many other factors are at play and, in fact, crime began falling in the United States three years before COPS existed.

The number of officers hired through COPS also was relatively small. Worrall's study found, for instance, that the average police department's share of COPS grants accounted for only one half of 1 percent of the department's budget.

Meanwhile, a critical 2005 study by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, found that officers hired through COPS represented less than 3 percent of officers nationwide - not nearly enough to account for the major shift in crime trends the nation enjoyed in the 1990s.

"Nationally, it's hard to imagine how the COPS program would make a difference," said Jeffrey Fagan, co-director of the Center for Crime, Community and Law at Columbia Law School in New York. He has studied city and national crime trends for years. "This is akin to a small dose of medicine. Can a small dose cause a big effect? Only if it's a wonder drug."

The Justice Department's office of Community Oriented Policing Services says the program put its 100,000th officer on the beat in May 1999.

But that's in doubt, too, thanks to certain assumptions by the Justice Department about how local agencies spent their COPS grants. In 1999, the Justice Department's inspector general found that the program actually helped hire fewer than 60,000 officers, and that most cities and counties didn't have the funding to keep the new officers once their three-year COPS grants expired.

"Just because you get the money, that doesn't mean you're using it" for officers, said David Muhlhausen, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Institute, whose study of the COPS program also finds disparities in how many officers it hired and how effective they were.

The GAO report, meanwhile, figured that COPS helped cut crime by 1.1 percent in 1997 and, by 2000, a total of 1.3 percent.

"While we find that COPS expenditures led to increases in sworn police officers ... we conclude that COPS grants were not the major cause of the decline in crime from 1994 through 2001," the report said. "Other factors ... combined to contribute more to the reduction in crime than did COPS expenditures."

One 2002 study by researchers at the University of Nebraska and Southwest Texas State University did find that the COPS program performed as well as expected and that it was largely responsible for falling crime.

But that study was funded by the COPS program itself, raising questions about impartiality. Other researchers have widely criticized its methodology.

For one thing, critics said, it failed to consider timely demographic and socioeconomic changes. Nor did it take into account that the crime rate was already dropping when COPS took effect.

"I hate to come out and trash the COPS program - it's one of the biggest criminal justice programs in 40 years," said Worrall of the University of Texas at Dallas. "But I'm also cynical that hiring alone is going to lead to a big reduction in crime."

Over the years, the Justice Department's office of Community Oriented Policing Services has cut and added programs to respond to evolving crises, such as the methamphetamine epidemic in some rural areas. The program generally gets rave reviews from police chiefs who are happy to have the money.

The program also has shrunk since President Bush took office in 2001. This year's budget is estimated at $542-million, compared with annual budgets averaging more than $1-billion from 1995 to 2000.